Ethics consultation, defined as "a service provided by an individual consultant, team or committee to address the ethical issues involved in a specific, active, clinical case,'' is a relatively new health care service that has been proliferating rapidly in recent years. The rapid growth of ethics consultation has occurred, however, in the absence of rigorous evaluation of its quality or effectiveness. In particular, a lack of accurate descriptive data on ethics consultation presents a significant impediment to meaningful evaluative research in this area. The proposed project is a one-year descriptive study that will set the stage for future evaluative research on ethics consultation. The research questions to be addressed include the following: How prevalent is ethics consultation in U.S. hospitals? What is the best estimate as to how many consultations are performed annually within and across ethics consultation services? What are the relative frequencies of various ethics consultation models (e.g. committee, team, consultant)? Who performs ethics consultation and what are their background and training? How are existing consultation mechanisms structured and how do they operate? The research design is a cross-sectional survey of 700 general hospitals selected randomly from the American Hospital Association's Guide to the Health Care Field. At each hospital, a best informant regarding ethical issues will be identified by telephone using a standardized protocol. Initial contacts with "best informants" will ascertain the presence or absence of ethics consultation at each hospital. In hospitals that offer ethics consultation, "best Informants" will be asked to provide detailed descriptive information about their own ethics consultation service, by telephone and/or by written questionnaire.